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Once you get over the initial outrage, it actually makes perfect sense.

Our attention spans are short, four minutes seems like an eternity, therefore something designed to capture our attention — say, a pop song — should be twice as good at half the length.

That’s the ruthless logic behind QuickHitz, a radio format that launched last September in the U.S. and has, as of this month, made its first incursion into Canada, at Calgary station 90.3 AMP, as FP reported.

In a nutshell, QuickHitz doesn’t care if you’re Drake, Lorde or Lana Del Rey. Your single is going to get cut down to about two minutes, with a hard target of 24 songs — about twice the number common to a patient society — during each hour of airtime.

When the format’s first terrestrial (as opposed to strictly online) station, WYDS (a.k.a. 93.1 the Party) in Decatur, Ill., launched in September 2013, a typical playlist featured Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” Lorde’s “Royals” and Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” — or at least QuickHitz versions of them. None clocked in at longer than 2:20. “Summertime” topped out at a humbling 1:50.

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Though the QuickHitz format was first offered to stations in 2012, the original, even more extreme inspiration was spawned seven years earlier. That’s when a feature called “The 60 Song Music Hour” — yes, five dozen songs pruned to one minute apiece — made its debut on an alternative San Francisco station, as chronicled by Billboard.biz.

Now, listeners of a certain age would contend that the notion goes back considerably further than that. You could argue, notes columnist/consultant Sean Ross, that “it’s a throwback to the mid ’60s when stations used to attack each other regularly on the number of (then shorter) songs they played per hour, usually somewhere in the 16-17 song range.”

What does it sound like? The results are initially disorienting and ultimately insidious.

Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Sia, Deadmau5, Beyoncé . . . the songs are over before you know it, which is, of course, the point. As the slogan warns, “Twice the music, all the time.”

The subtext is more troubling: After awhile, you don’t mind that the songs have been hacked in half because they’re generally not interesting enough to be damaged by the blade of attenuation.

If the idea isn’t new, the execution is actually pretty radical. When fans and academics alike pontificate about distilling a piece of music into the archetypal pop song, the criteria usually have to do with beats per minute, key (C major seems to be favoured by professional hitmakers), even the structure of the song’s intro.

It is remarkable, for example, just how many Pharrell Williams songs start exactly the same way: “He takes the first beat of the first bar, loops it four times, then goes straight into the song,” as Mark Evans, a.k.a. blogger MrDiscoPop, observes, cementing his point with a devastatingly effective 1:42 medley of 13 of Pharrell’s most famous song intros.

When length is mentioned, the consensus is often a range: between three minutes and 3:59. No one has argued it should be half that.

With QuickHitz eyeing Britain next (and, presumably, world domination after that), the subsequent logical step would be to cut out the middleman altogether and start making singles that are two minutes long to begin with.

A bridge, a solo, an introduction longer than five beats? Who needs those?

In that context, the next format is virtually predestined: AllChorus.

RETRO/ACTIVE: Five months after Jesse Winchester died peacefully in his sleep, his final album has a release date.

Out Sept. 15, A Reasonable Amount of Trouble is produced by Nashville songwriter Mac McAnally and was recorded while Winchester was in remission from cancer.

It showcases nine originals and three covers, among them “Rhythm of the Rain,” a hit across three decades for The Cascades, Gary Lewis & The Playboys, and Dan Fogelberg.

Marianne Faithfull was just 18 when her version of “As Tears Go By,” a track released a year before the Stones’ own version, kick-started her career.

Fifty years later, she’s back with her strongest single in decades. Written for her by Roger Waters, “Sparrows Will Sing” is both immediate and idiosyncratic and previews a new album, Give My Love to London. It’s due out Sept. 30.

Best known for his work with Madonna and Blur, Orbit appears to be shepherding the tentatively titled Queen Forever, a collection of unreleased recordings featuring Freddie Mercury. It’ll be the first such material to surface in almost 20 years, since the surprisingly enduring Made in Heaven.

THE VINYL COUNTDOWN: Each of the past two Record Store Days has seen a Gordon Lightfoot album reissued on vinyl. This year it was a 180-gram pressing of Sundown; last year it was Sit Down Young Stranger.

This month, his double-platinum compilation, Gord’s Gold, joins that select group. Released through the boutique reissue label Friday Music, the 1975 hits package has been mastered for this release from the original Reprise tapes. It arrives Aug. 26.

As welcome as that news is, isn’t it about time someone combined the two volumes of Gord’s Gold and replaced the re-recorded selections with the originals? The first one, after all, doesn’t even include “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

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